Anthony Plaut was born in Boston and raised in California and Washington DC. He grew up in Iowa where he attended Cornell College. Later he did graduate work at the University of Chicago. He now teaches art at Cornell College. He has been a participant in many group shows in the region including a number of â€œIowa Artistsâ€ exhibitions at the Des Moines Art Center. He is currently represented in by the Olson-Larsen Gallery in Des Moines.

About his current body of work Anthony writes, "This year I have embarked upon a new series of objects that merge many of my longstanding interest and abilities ... I categorize these recent pieces as â€˜assemblagesâ€™ (3-dimensional collages) because they are comprised primarily of â€˜foundâ€™ materials. Each of them has a mechanical aspect that is actuated by the human activity of winding a spring-driven motor. My hope for these pieces is that they appear, at first glance, to be one of two things: either a pile of miscellaneous junk or a commercially manufactured object. In both of these cases I hope that closer scrutiny leads to the realization that the sculptures are actually carefully crafted from familiar objects for a particular effect, albeit an effect that is difficult to translate into words. I want them to thrive like some poems do, with ideas of beauty, a bit of nostalgia, and an unspecified but familiar sense of something important and shared. The inherent beauty of collage and assemblage work is that it takes items from the â€˜ordinary worldâ€™ and allows them to retain their individual associations, yet at the same time creates a new set of unexpected and unpredictable associations. This is the ordinary made extraordinary. I use puns and other plays of language as titles for the pieces. These linguistic supplements are, in a sense, another set of â€˜collageâ€™ elements because they pull a piece of language from one use and apply it to another in a way that allows both meanings to function simultaneously with or against one another."